1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of data processing. More specifically, the present invention relates to methodologies associated with communicating and/or transacting with clients.
2. Background Information
With advances in microprocessor, networking and telecommunication technologies, increasingly computing devices are networked together through private and public networks, such as the Internet. As a result, increasingly, software, content as well as service providers desire to communicate and/or transact with their clients online directly.
Examples of such desired communication and/or transactions include but are not limited to                an airline offering special airfares        an online retailer announcing special sales        a content provider announcing availability of new contents        an online application service provider or a software distributor announcing service bulletins, new functions, and/or new products.        
Under the prior art, many of these announcements and/or offerings are made “passively”, e.g. on the provider's home page. The “passive” approach has the desired characteristic of being “non-intrusive”, i.e. the user's routine operations are not intruded upon, until the user connects to the provider's web site. However, the approach suffers from the obvious disadvantage of being “passive”, i.e. the user is not alerted of the announcement or offering until the user connects to the provider's site. Further, the approach is “non-persistent”, i.e. once the user accesses another page, the announcement or offering is no longer available to the user.
Alternatively, under the prior art, some announcements or offerings are made in more “active” or “assertive” manners. For examples, some announcements or offerings are made via “pushed” emails, user prompts (when a user logs in for online services), highlighting a program product and/or content offering's own icon (upon detecting the user being online), and so forth. While these more “active” or “assertive” approaches may be able to alert the user more effectively, they all tend to have the disadvantage of being intrusive, i.e. disrupting the user's routine online operation (requiring the user to at a minimum “cancel” the notification if the user elects not to accept the offering at the time, e.g. canceling an “upgrade available notice” if elected not to upgrade at the moment). Further, many also lack the desired characteristic of “persistency”. That is, once the user “cancels”, the announcement or offering is “gone”, until the reoccurrence of the triggering event, causing the intrusive announcement or offering to be made again.
Accordingly, an improved approach to communicate and/or transact with clients is desired.